IT core modernization projects—and new technology implementations—took longer and cost
more than planned to make many public sector CIOs hesitant to pull the trigger on large IT
projects, Werfel notes. This has fostered a fair
amount of risk aversion when it comes to investing in new technologies.

While citizen expectations, budgets, demographics and technologies mark the most notable disruptions roiling the public sector, that list
is not complete. Cybersecurity, infrastructure
needs and fraud and waste also represent major
drivers of consulting services.

Talent, Tech and Transformation

The pressures zeroing in on public sector organizations prompt them to seek consulting help
that neatly fits into people, process and technology
buckets. Of course, there is plenty of overlap and
interconnectivity among these general categories.

The talent management solutions firms are
delivering in response to demographic reckonings, for example, often involve technology
and process-improvement elements that bolster
knowledge transfer and succession planning
while introducing more efficient workflows. The
growing demand for evidence-based decision-making, Otal reports, has increased public sector
clients’ hunger for better data analytics capabilities and for strategic insights regarding which
programs and operations can be consolidated.

Similarly, organizational change and transformation efforts often leverage new—or newish—technology, such as cloud-computing,
which in turn may require core modernization
work along with IT consulting organizational
change work that accompany the introduction
of agile development methodologies.

The most common forms of consulting requests from public sector clients this year in-

State spending in the U.S. grew in 2016, but at a sig- nificantly lower rate ( 4 percent) than state spending increased in 2015 ( 6. 9 percent), according to the Na- tional Association of State Budget Officers’ (NASBOs’)
current State Expenditure Report. This declining growth rate
likely reflects that fact that the two largest sources of state
revenue—the collection of personal income and sales taxes—
also posted lower year-over-year growth in 2016, according
to NASBO. The 2016 drop in state expenditure growth is
more noteworthy when considering that the state expenditure
growth rate increased steadily since 2012—when the growth
bottomed out at its lowest point in at least two decades. Plus,
NASBO projects that states will increase spending by only 1
percent in the current fiscal year. —E.K.